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It’s been a couple of weeks since Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm. The weakening from a Category 4 storm must’ve really tweaked alarmists.

NOAA just updated their much-adjusted ERSST.v5 sea surface temperature dataset to include September 2018 data. So let’s take a look at the September sea surface temperature anomalies for Florence’s full storm track. Keep in mind, these are preliminary data from NOAA. That is, if you were to check these results in a number of months, the September 2018 value might be different. The reason: the high-frequency filtering applied to NOAA’s ERSST.v5 sea surface temperature data. See Huang et al. 2017. Thus the notes in blue on the time-series graphs that follow.

NOTE: Please understand that I am not attempting to make light of the losses in life and property, or other sufferings, associated with Hurricane Florence. This post is solely intended to provide a reference for those who would like to use real data to counter the typical alarmist nonsense normally spread during and after natural disasters like Florence…alarmist nonsense spread by the mainstream media, by enviro-profiteers, by brainwashed gullible persons, by activist climate scientists who wallow in government funding, and by politicians (Eek, it’s an election year!).

We all realize the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near to the coast of the Carolinas were higher-than-normal. But, obviously, sea surface temperatures are not the only thing to dictate the strength of hurricanes. This should have become blatantly obvious when Florence weakened significantly in its last few days over the North Atlantic, back to a category 1 storm, before making landfall. According to Dr. Judith Curry’s discussion here, the weakening before landfall was caused by wind shear. Thank you, wind shear…and thank you, too, Judith.

Many persons ignore the eastern portion of Florence’s earlier storm track where the sea surface temperatures were well below normal. In this post, I’m presenting the sea surface temperature anomalies for the entire track, the warmer-than-normal and cooler-than-normal portions combined. And as you’ll soon discover, there was nothing unprecedented about the sea surface temperatures for Florence’s full storm track.

Figure 1 is a map that shows the full storm track of Tropical Storm-Hurricane Florence. I’ve highlighted the three regions I’ve used for its full track. They are 12.5N-22.5N, 42.5W-22.5W for the southeastern portion, where Florence formed; 17.5N-37.5N, 60W-42.5W for the central part; and 25N-35N, 80W-60W for the northwestern, closer-to-shore portion.

Figure 1

For the graph that follows in Figure 2, I’ve provided a weighted average of the three grids, where the northwestern (25N-35N, 80W-60W) grid is weighted at 34.8%, and the central (17.5N-37.5N, 60W-42.5W) grid is weighted 30.4%, and the southeastern (15N-25N, 42.5W-22.5W) grid is weighted at 34.8%. That is, the southeast and northwest portions of the storm track are weighted the same, while the center portion is weighted a little less.

Figure 2 is a time-series graph of the sea surface temperature anomalies for the full storm track of Florence, with the data for the three regions weighted and averaged as discussed above. The September 2018 anomaly was a not-so-alarming +0.26 deg C above the 1981 to 2010 average.

Figure 2

In other words, as the title of the post reads there was nothing unprecedented about the sea surface temperatures for Florence’s full storm track. That value has been regularly achieved as far back as the 1940s and the late 1800s.

JUST IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING

Figures 3, 4 and 5 present the ERSST.v5-based long-term sea surface temperature anomaly data for the three regions individually. As you’ll see, the September 2018, sea surface temperature anomalies were not unprecedented in any of the regions used of Florence’s storm track.

Figure 3

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Figure 4

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Figure 5

TRIVIA: WHAT DECADE SINCE 1900 HAD THE MOST HURRICANES MAKE LANDFALL IN THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES?

When I published my short story Dad, Is Climate Getting Worse in the United States?, I promised myself I would never present any of the graphs from it in a blog post. Well, I’m about to break that promise to myself so that I can answer the above question. See Exhibit 02 below from that short story.

The 10-year period ending in 1942 had the highest 10-year average, of course. On a decade basis, basically, the 1930s had the highest number of hurricanes making landfall on the continental United States. And please notice, the recent 10-year averages are roughly half (and less than half) the peak value. The source of the data is the “The Hurricane Research Division of the NOAA Atlantic Ocean Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), specifically the table with data titled “Continental United States Hurricane Impacts/Landfalls 1851–2017” at their website here [archived here].

READ THEM FOR “FREE”? Both of those Kindle ebooks are now available through Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, so if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, you can read the books at no additional cost.

To those of you who have purchased them or downloaded them, thank you very much. To those who haven’t, please do. You might even learn something. I always learn stuff while preparing my books.